Born in 1936, New York native Richard Ben Sapir is best known for The Destroyer series of novels that he co-created with Warren Murphy. The first Destroyer was written in 1963, while Sapir worked as a city hall reporter in Jersey City, New Jersey and Murphy served as secretary to the city's mayor. Ahead of its time with a plot centered upon a brash young westerner trained in the martial arts by a master assassin from North Korea, the book went unpublished until June 1971 but eventually spawned a highly successful adventure series with over 30 million copies in print by the late 1990s.

Before arriving on the illustrious shores of Sinanju, Sapir worked as an editor and in public relations. In addition to The Destroyer series, Sapir wrote five novels: Bressio (1975), The Far Arena (1978), The Body (1983), Spies (1984), and Quest (1987), a modern day search for the Holy Grail. The Body, which was made into a movie in 2001, is about a Jewish Archaeologist who finds a skeleton underneath an Arab shopkeeper's basement that might be the body of Jesus and the American Jesuit priest who is sent by the Vatican to investigate.

Richard Sapir was a graduate of Columbia University and lived with his wife in New Hampshire before he died in 1987 from a heart attack.